How to Know More About Pain | Definition of Pain and How to Treat Pain

Hello, this is Janne. This video's purpose is to give you a simple explanation of what pain is and what kind of pain mechanisms people have. Healthcare personnel tend to use terminology that is really difficult to understand - the purpose of this video is to break down those difficult terms in an easier way.

Why do we have pain? It comes from evolution, and we need it to learn new sets of skills to survive much better. What is the definition of pain? An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage.

When we think about the peripheral notion - the stuff that makes sensations travel to our brain - we have group one fibers: if I feel touch in my finger, it starts to travel up my spinal cord to my brain, and it has a myelin sheath on top of it. When we do nerve conduction studies, we check how fast the nerve conducts - if there is a lack of that myelin sheath in the fiber, it will produce certain kinds of results. In group two there are small and slower-reacting nociceptors that have a higher threshold level, and for example mechanical stimulus or high temperature will activate them a bit more slowly compared to group one. In group three we have C-fibers, which are slow-reacting - they don't have a myelin sheath on top of them, and they are responsible for the perception of pain; those are the feelings we get from our body. C-fibers are polymodal - if you get certain kinds of sensory input all the time, those C-fibers might come into play and start delivering the message to our brain that we are having these kinds of feelings in our body. When we do nerve conduction studies checking how fast the nerve is, we won't see the same kind of response in C-fibers.

I was in a professional course concerning pain, and this was a really good example: mosquitoes. We have a lot of them in Finland - once a mosquito lands on the skin and stings my arm, the signal from that starts to go to my spinal cord and then to my brain, and my brain thinks "okay, a mosquito has stung me, easy peasy, no threat to life, everything is okay." But if I imagine myself in some sort of exotic country and a mosquito stings me, the travel of that signal to the brain is the same, but my brain starts to think "do I have all my vaccines, or not?" If I start to interpret it as a threat to my life or health, the response is very different. So emotions really affect pain perception.

Let's start with the easy ones. ---